96MB Low End VPS Review Part IX – FST Servers

Joe from FST Servers left a comment on one of my previous reviews stating that they would like me to write a review about them. I have never heard about this company before – no reviews, no history, but the fact that they are using Citrix XenServer is something that makes them a really worthy one to be reviewed for.

General Information and Prices

There is really limited information I can find about FST Servers, through the domainchecks, their domain is registered to Brendan Fusco in Chicago Illinois and it seems to be where their servers are based as well according to this post on LowEndBox.com. As per this post on Webhostingtalk, they have decent processing power on the hardware nodes, as well as completely dedicated resources with nothing “burstable”.

Prices offered are definitely in the low end of the budget spectrum, especially for XenServer platform, with the lowest priced plan starting at $4 per month (with further discount if you pay annually), which is definitely the cheapest I have seen with Chicago servers using such platform. Their additional IP addresses are also relatively cheap at $1/month per IP address. Furthermore, because of the XenServer platform, you are essentially allowed to load any OS, including Windows 2003 and 2008 (although I would really doubt if 128MB of RAM is capable enough to support a Windows installation).

As the review was requested by FST Servers, the test box was set up without going through the regular sign up process and therefore can not comment on the time taken for the server to set up.

Custom Control Panel

The FST Control Panel is the name for their custom control panel, and is definitely one of the highlights of the review. For most of the XenServer providers, there is no control panel and you practically have to submit a ticket for everything from reloading the OS to recovery console access if clients are unable to access the VPS via the shell.

After login through HTTPs, here is how the control panel looks like:

As you can see, everything is on the same screen and is very straight-forward, which is definitely something that will be appealing to many clients.

On the main screen, the VPS could be reset, stopped and started with a click of a button, emergency recovery console is also available. Furthermore, adding reverse DNS can be done with a click of mouse as well.

Contact Support is pretty straight forward as well with four departments for technical support, sales, billing and other.

When clicking on the VPS, there are further configuration options that are available to the VPS:

From here, you can upgrade VM to a higher plan, as well as reloading OS, changing root password and hostname. It is interesting to note that in order to install CentOS, VM-2 is required (Windows as well, but that is hardly a surprise), since I am not aware that CentOS can’t run on 128MB on VPS.

The upgrade VM option does not allow upgrading according a certain feature of the VPS (i.e., upgrading only the RAM or the hard drive space), instead, you will need to upgrade to the next level of VM plan, making it impossible to create a customized VPS plan, which is perhaps the biggest distinction I can see between FST’s VPSes and those of the trending “cloud” hosts.

For their VM-0 VPS, the following OS templates are available:

which basically including the latest versions of Debian and Ubuntu. There is also a PBX in a Flash template, which would be useful for those interested in using the VPS box as a private phone exchange system.

When clicking on the second tab, creating VPS, which is essentially their order page, shows up:

It seems that new VPS could be created “within a few minutes” after the payment is submitted, which seems to hint that the provision of VPS is instant. Unfortunately, from what I can see, at this point, credit card seems to be the only payment method, which is perhaps not a very great piece of news to Paypal lovers.

FST Servers also has a detailed documentation about their control panel, which can be found here.

Overall, the custom control panel is pretty good, providing users a very compact but yet powerful interface to control the VPS, however, if CentOS could be permitted for VM-0 or VM-1 packages (at least a minimal template) and more payment gateways could be used, it would be really great.

Tests on the VPS

The test VPS that I have received is their lowest priced plan (VM-0), which include 128MB of RAM, 7GB of hard drive and 500GB per month of bandwidth. When the OS was first loaded up, only 8MB of RAM was used, which is impressive:

This is definitely one of the best, if not the best, disk I/O that I have witnessed.

I have done quite a bit of research about their VPS offerings, however one thing that I could not find is their port speed. Nonetheless, the wget results using Cachefly seems to indicate that they are on Gbit port:

In conclusion, other than the processing power, this VPS box offers impressive disk I/O and network speed, however, for $4/month, there is really not a lot more you can ask for.

Support and Customer Services

I have to confess that I had a hard time to send a ticket in to see how well FST Servers responds, because basically everything was in the control panel. However, when I finally did, the question was responded in 13 minutes (question submitted at 5:03PM, response received at 5:16PM) with a very detailed description and the link to the documentation page containing relevant information.

Conclusion

Low prices, compact but useful custom control panel, fast disk I/O and network speed, and fast ticket response are a few great things that worth giving this box a try. Granted it is not the most powerful box that ever listed on 96MB review and adding a little more power to the processors would perhaps be better (and I am having a hard time comprehending why CentOS could not run on a 128MB box), but for merely 4USD per month, this service definitely worth every single cent that is paid for.

3 thoughts on “96MB Low End VPS Review Part IX – FST Servers”

It is nice to see some providers with a custom control panel this seems to be getting more popular these days.

Note on the CentOS only being available on the 256mb+ packages I would assume this is because YUM has a hard time with anything less that 256mb.

That said with enough SWAP which you seem to have according to ‘top’ it usually manages ok.

As you said for $4 it does pretty well by the look of it, although budget providers seem to be getting a hard press these days the fact that an effort has been made to create their own CP shows a good amount of effort has been made with the back end infrastructure services so although I have never heard of them either they are probably going to be a good company +1

@Anthony: I do think it is a great idea to create a custom control panel, especially for Xen server, which I am not sure if SolusVM does support it fully yet. Therefore, it definitely make sense for them to implement their own custom control panel instead of receiving 20 tickets a day on rebooting/reloading OS. CentOS seems to be a memory hogger from what I can see, so may be restricting it to higher plans does make sense. Good company you have as well and I sincerely hope all the great VPS providers will be around for a long long time

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